Advent

By Jane Fraser

"An epic, intimate novel that reeled me in and kept me... utterly engrossed" Euros Lyn Bafta-winning tv and Film Director

"Fraser explores themes of womanhood, expectation, power, and identity with an unflinching eye. Her storytelling is brimming with truth and tension."

Rebecca F. John

Winter, 1904, and feisty twenty-one-year-old Ellen has been summoned back from her new life in Hoboken, New Jersey, to the family farm on windswept Gower, in a last bid to prevent the impending death of her alcoholic father.

On her return, she finds the family in disarray. Ailing William is gambling away large swathes of Thomas land; frustrated Eleanor is mourning the husband she once knew; and Ellen's younger twin brothers face difficult choices. Ellen, tasked with putting her family's lives in order, finds herself battling one impossible decision after another.

Resourceful, passionate, and forthright, can she remain in Gower, where being female still brings with it so many limitations? Can she endure being so close to her lost love? Will she choose home and duty, or excitement and opportunity across the Atlantic?

"An evocative, powerful novel which conjures up a strong sense of place with the lightest of brushstrokes. A tightly-woven narrative that lingers long in the mind."

Fflur Dafydd

"This lovely, lovely novel has its own quiet and insistent music, beating to the daily rhythms of hard work even as it probes the way in which love can breed its own cruelties."

Jon Gower

• Language: English
• Publisher: Honno Press
• Release date: Jan 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781912905263

Jane Fraser

Jane Fraser lives, works and writes in the Gower peninsula. Her debut collection of short fiction The South Westerlies was published by Salt in 2019. In 2017 she was a finalist in the Manchester Fiction Prize and she is a Hay Writer at Work. Advent is her first novel.

Book preview

Chapter 1

As the train approaches Gowerton North, Ellen reaches for the Gladstone bag she’s placed in the overhead luggage net at Liverpool. A gentleman rises from the bench seat opposite and offers to help.

I can manage, thanks, she says, and then lets out a sigh almost as heavy as the baggage she’s carted unaided all the way across the Atlantic. And to think she thought she was travelling light.

She slides open the glass door of the compartment and stands outside in the narrow corridor to look out as the station gets ever nearer, attempting to free the window of condensation with the arm of her coat. Even though it’s December, the green shocks: trees, hedges, fields, everything so clean looking and newly washed. She’s forgotten how many shades of green there are in Gower. And then remembers the rain.

She’s increasingly impatient and taps her sturdy lace-up shoes on the floor. She’ll save time standing in the corridor, bag at her side, ready to alight. Doesn’t want to waste any more. Been long enough already. Doesn’t want to keep the boys waiting either. God knows how long they’ll have been at the station, what with the stops and starts she’s had to put up with all day, winding her way through the heart of Wales.

She removes the glove from her left hand and stretches out her hand through the small gap in the sliding window that has been left open for ventilation. Feels the moving air. Tests the temperature. It’s not cold; more dank and dismal. Yet, despite the mild weather, she’s cold: exhaustion, probably. And the smoke that is seeping in is getting to the back of her throat. It’s made her filthy. She blows her nose into her handkerchief with gusto – loud and functional – then studies the black smut on the white cotton. Disgusting, yet at the same time, compelling.

She lets herself be lulled by the rhythm of the train, the monotonous chug of the engine, the pattern of the wheels on the tracks. And then the shift from fast to slower and slow as the end of the line approaches.

She knows she doesn’t look her best: her face is puffy with the gruelling journey, her complexion, sallow, even wan. She can feel the colour draining out of her. In this mess, she’s going to appear older than her twenty-one years. And her hair needs a wash. Even though it’s pinned in a tight bun and tucked under her black hat, she can feel her scalp itching. Not at all how she wants to look for a homecoming. She’d wanted to show them. Yes, that’s the word: show them. Show them how she’s changed in two years, show them the woman she’s become, the woman who manages alone in a city that everybody goes to, quite unlike this place that everybody comes from.

Everything feels tight and she knows it’s not just down to the stays that are digging into her ribcage and abdomen. She’ll be glad to finally get home and get them off, kick off her shoes and stockings, change her drawers, shake her hair loose. She wonders whether it will still feel like home when she gets there or whether home is somewhere else these days. No doubt her gut will give her the answer. Or time. She also wonders if on a Thursday there’ll be any chance of a bath; any hot water in the copper. It’s going to be no holiday. But she had to come.

She recognised in an instant her brother George’s fine hand on the envelope: the carefully formed letters, the even, forward slope, the fine loops and swirls. Not a blot of ink anywhere. Miss. Ellen Thomas. 167, River Avenue, Hoboken, NJ, America. And when she stood in the scullery where she was cooking lunch for Mrs. Randall, and took the knife and sliced through the edge of the envelope, the contents had ripped at her insides:

He can’t last much longer. You know how he is – and there’s nothing we can do here to stop him. Perhaps you can talk some sense into him, sis…

All that seems so long ago now, even though it is just short of a month since Mrs. Randall said that she simply must return to Wales for one last Christmas with her ailing father. She’d want her children to do the same for her if they had to. She’d kindly given her the money for the return trip, even if it was the stench of steerage that would have to be endured again. Your job will be here when you come back, Ellen. If indeed you do come back, she’d said.

So now she’s chugging into the little wooden station in this little country from which she set off with just ten pounds in her purse, her Gladstone bag and a forwarding address courtesy of her sponsor, Edward Dix, who had left Llanrhidian earlier. Her baby brothers – twins George and Jack – had seen her off, waved her goodbye. They’d been just fifteen then. Double trouble. And now they’re coming to pick her up again.

She feels the damp chill of coming winter about her, seeping into the peep of ankle between her long dark coat and laced shoes. Two years can feel like a long time, yet like no time at all.

Chapter 2

They’re at the end of the platform near the ticket office as the train pulls in, their eyes scouring the emptying carriages for her.

George! Jack! she shouts as she charges out of the carriage and through the steam, as they come hurtling towards her.

Jack picks her up and swings her around, kisses her on the cheek and places her carefully back down on the platform. George takes his turn after his brother. All three of them stand still in a tight huddle for a moment in the hiss of the steam, just looking at each other.

Well, just look at you two, says Ellen, been standing in manure?

They smile widely, proud of their obvious maturity, puffing out their chests. Jack takes Ellen’s bag as they walk beside the length of the train to the buffers.

Look well, Nell, says Jack. Blooming.

"Fibber. Not exactly at my best after six days at sea and a journey all the way from Liverpool in that," says Ellen pointing to the engine.

She takes her handkerchief – tucked under her cuff – and blows her nose again as violently as she can.

Sorry, she says, but needs must.

Not very ladylike, says George.

Well, you know me, says Ellen.

Must be worn out, says Jack. Get you back in no time now. They’re all ready and waiting for you there.

Ellen strides away, the ground swaying beneath her. The two boys slow to keep pace with her as they leave the cover of the small station and walk towards the pony and trap tethered to the rail in the yard outside. Ellen feels comforted by her younger brothers, the mere, and yet sheer, physical presence of them settling her. At least for the time being.

Aah, old Celt still going strong, then? says Ellen as she pats the old grey shire on the nose and leans her own head forward, burrowing deep into his mane.

"Aye, at least he is still going strong," says George.

Ellen looks at him, not too tired to read the underlying message. She says nothing. Not yet.

Smells like home, she says, raising her face from Celt’s poll.

At three o’clock in mid-December it is still officially light, but it is drizzling: that monotonous fine, silent drizzle that seems to soak the Gower peninsula from the inside out. Ellen turns her face to feel the rain on her cheek.

Soft, she whispers. Not like this in America.

Aye, says George, seems like it hasn’t stopped since you’ve been gone. Ground can’t take much more. Mild, mind. Too mild. From the south west still.

Still the old weather-forecaster, then, George? Sound like an old man.

Still the old sarcastic tone, then, Nell?

Don’t start now, you two. C’mon we’ll have you home within the hour if we can get this old bugger to get a move on, says Jack as he puts Ellen’s bag in the back of the trap.

The three of them seat themselves on the bench up front, Ellen in the middle, cushioned between the twins’ firm bodies. She turns to each of them, one after the other, pressing her nose in the cloth of their woven coats.

Lovely, she says. Can’t beat it. Sweat and wool. Like a couple of old rams.

The boys laugh as Jack takes hold of the reins and they pick up a trot along the road that snakes through the marshlands alongside the estuary to the north. George spreads a carthen over Ellen’s legs.

You’re exhausted, he says, feel the damp when you’re tired. She pats his thigh and places her head on his shoulder.

Does it ever stop raining, here? she asks, holding her palms up to the sky.

Only a bit of drizzle, Jack says. Better than it was. Haven’t gone all soft over there, have you?

Ellen wonders for a moment if she has become hardened, made frostier by the bitter winters. She lets the fine, salty rain soak her cheeks, dampen the strands of hair that have come loose from her bun and are straggling across her face under her black hat. She recalls her grandmother Elizabeth’s words: You’ll be all right once you get used to the water over there. And she’d been right. Once her stomach had settled and her bowels calmed to the hard water of the eastern seaboard, she’d bedded in. But she’d never been able to get her hair to behave there: she missed the gentle Welsh water on her scalp, the silky feel of her long locks after a good egg and vinegar shampoo had been rinsed out.

The rhythm of the trot is soothing and the boys know better than to chunter on when Ellen is tired. By now she is in a trance-like state that only travel and exhaustion can inflict on a body. She gazes out to the estuary on her right as they round the bend into the village of Penclawdd. The signal slows them to a stop as the station master swings closed the gates across the road to let through the train laden with trucks of anthracite. As they wait, Ellen breathes in the air: the salt off the incoming tide is strong, the distinctive stench of shellfish thickening the air. The marsh ponies stand, fetlock high, on mounds of higher ground tufted with reeds, spiking above the River Loughor, which is swollen in the advancing tide. They face shoreward with a surety that they’ll be all right: the tide will come in, the tide will go out (just as it always had, just as it always would), and they would get back to roaming and grazing freely until the tide came in again. Ellen feels as though they’ve been standing there stoically, in that same position, since she said her goodbyes. Here, in Gower, some things never change, but her stomach churns at the thought of what she will find when she gets home to the farm.

As they approach Llanrhidian, she feels her stays constricting her even more, feels one of her headaches coming on. She’ll be glad to get in. But then again, she won’t.

Well, what am I to expect, then? she asks.

Like I said in the letter. Shadow of the man he was, says George. Mother’s still going hell for leather. Know what she’s like. Not much pity for him, mind you.

Nothing changed, then? asks Ellen.

You could say that. Anyway, glad you’ve come. Mother’ll be too, though she probably won’t let on. And Gran. Sad to see your son like that, going down the drain. Still the same old Gran. Still sitting in her settle. Never stops talking about you, mind, wondering about her little Nell.

Ellen pulls the carthen tightly around her, feeling an overwhelming sensation of transition and time passing.

As they slow to begin the descent down the steep track into the village of Llanrhidian, Ellen asks Jack to pull up.

You go on boys, she says, I’ll be with you in a minute. Want to have a bit of a breather.

She needs to feel the ground again, anchor herself through her feet. She has to get her bearings. Prepare herself. She turns to face the estuary, the shore opposite around Llanelli dotted with chimney stacks and plumes of smoke, listless. Beyond that, the mountains of Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire, and beyond that, a land across an ocean she can no longer see, a land that was her home.

She turns back to orientate herself. It is only a step now to the farm at Mount Pleasant, the stone house with the thick walls, set under the limestone hill with its commanding location above the village. A privileged position, her mother used to say with pride, though Ellen had always found the name ironic. As she trudges up the short but steep incline towards her old home, she wonders what has changed there. She recalls her mother: just bits of her and not her face. Mostly that rounded jelly-tussock of a belly which, though her breeding days were long gone, still had a use as a bread board.

She can see her in her place at the side of the kitchen table. In her left hand, she’s cradling the newly baked loaf, snuggling the base into the ready stomach-shelf: in her right, she’s gripping the large serrated bread knife that she will thrust through the crust and forge through the white dough with a vigorous see-saw motion. She will say grace then and remain on hand, serving the men already seated. And then there are her flat-tipped hands, weathered, veins standing proud. Hands, that had nursed five children and smoothed the hair of the one who’d died. Hands that could tug the udders of cows in the milking shed and pull lambs from ewes in the fields beyond. That could drown kittens in a galvanised bucket – out of sight – and give her brood the occasional slap. And when daylight died, by the light of the paraffin lamp, those same hands would rag Ellen’s hair and magic springy ringlets overnight. No doubt her mother will still be sitting in her stick-chair near the range, darning, mending, making do, casting on the wool she spun and clickety-clacking her way through the hours; knit-one-purl-one, ribbing the patterns embedded in her head.

*

As she approaches, the sight of his familiar working boots abandoned outside the kitchen door signals that her father, William, is in. That he hasn’t gone for a drink yet. From generation to generation, those boots just waiting to be stepped into.

There they all are in the kitchen as she envisaged, in their allocated positions: her mother Eleanor, her father, and her grandmother, Elizabeth. She wonders whether they stirred at all in the intervening years. But now as she enters they rouse themselves – those that can – standing up and inching forward, waiting their turn to welcome her. William remains seated in his place at the right of the range, in his familiar horsehair chair, with the winged backrest, the stuffing worming out of the faded upholstery. Ellen feels herself draining at the sight of his face which tells its own story: so empty, so broken. Time has caught up with him. She loses focus, and before her eyes appear colourless zigzag patterns followed by numbness and nausea: all tell-tale signs of a bad headache. She swallows hard before speaking:

Father. Good to see you. Missed you so much, she says.

He still doesn’t rise from the chair so she bends to plant a kiss on his brow, just as she’d always done. But now her lips feel the clamminess of his sallow, almost tallow skin. The sweet-stale smell of alcohol on his breath is as familiar as the kiss; but she says nothing about that as his eyes fill up.

She is aware of her mother’s needy stare, looking on at the scene from her place at the other side of the range; waiting her turn to greet her. Scenes she looked over all her life. Her face, like the range, has lost its shine: her white hair is even whiter, her hands fiddle with her apron. Ellen walks towards her, arms outstretched. She notices her mother’s eyes welling with tears. This is a first.

Never before has Ellen seen her mother even on the verge of crying. She hands her mother the handkerchief from up her sleeve to dab her eyes, and through the tears, the three women smile at the filth smeared on it.

No thanks, says Eleanor and wipes her face with her pinny instead.

It’s lovely to see you. Mother. Good to be home. How are you coping? she asks as she stoops to kiss her.

"As well as can be expected, considering," she replies in a low tone, placing the emphasis on considering and throwing at William one of the looks that Ellen well remembers, while he remains seemingly oblivious in the chair. Eleanor turns her cheek to accept Ellen’s kiss and raises her chin and her shoulders in an unusual harmony, as if trying to keep herself from being engulfed by rising water. Beyond Eleanor is Elizabeth, her grandmother, hunched over with a stick, at one end of her favourite settle in the corner where she has sat forever, trying to keep the draught off her.

My darling Nell, welcome home, we’ve mizzed thee, maid – much too much, if truth be told, says Elizabeth in that old Gower way of hers. Her grandmother’s voice is like a lullaby and when Elizabeth embraces her, it feels of days past; the warmth of the range in winter and hot, buttered toast done on the toasting fork.

Come and sit down at the table, here, Ellen, says Eleanor, nice cup of tea and a bit of cake. You must be whacked.

George pulls out a chair for her. It scrapes across the quarry tiles. It has only been a couple of minutes, but Ellen feels as though she has never been away. The light is fading fast from the kitchen with its two small windows, one back, one front, the ceilings low and beamed. Same smells: hams hanging from the charnel, damp washing draped